What is Instagram Shopping and how it works

More than a billion people a month use Instagram and the good news is that many more people than we think use it for more than just watching reels, animal videos and photos of their favorite influencers. As the social network reports, nearly half of people use Instagram to shop weekly. 500 million a month. Too many sales opportunities not to take advantage of.

We can use Instagram like a storefront on the street. Someone walks by, sees what we show through the glass, stops to look at it and enters. By making a call to action from an Instagram story and adding a link to our website, we can attract customers, but we all know that the simpler the buying process, the easier it is to sell.

Social Media can be much more than a showcase for our business and become a sales tool in itself, and one of the clearest examples can be found with Instagram Shopping.

What is Instagram Shopping

Although with the name something is intuitive, we are here to explain all the details of this tool. Instagram Shopping is a set of functions that allows anyone to buy your products in an easy way and from your Instagram photos or videos. It is a living showcase that changes with each publication and allows your followers to see and buy without leaving the application. An e-commerce on Instagram.

We may use Instagram to generate valuable content that incites the purchase of our products, something that undoubtedly works, but with this tool we will go a step further. 

Imagine you're in bed browsing Instagram before going to sleep. A ceramist posts on her feed her latest piece that appears on your timeline as if by magic. It's perfect for you, a work of art that would look wonderful on your office desk. But how do I buy it? You would have to enter the artist's Instagram profile, look for her e-commerce in the bio info, go to the search engine (if you have one) and pray to Saint Anthony to find the lost piece without going crazy trying. To be honest, most likely before even reaching the third step you will have lost interest. 

However, if by clicking on the image the price appears and I can buy it in one click, that desire that grew when I saw the image is not extinguished, but rather grows: I see the product, it generates a need and I buy it in one click. The success rate of the sale if we simplify the task is much higher. We expose the products and reduce the number of clicks to reach them. Easy-peasy.

Another advantage of this type of tool is that it is less intrusive and aggressive than a call to action. By scrolling your customers discover that you have just what they need and in an organic way. The Product Experience improves and also, this tool is the perfect way to measure the effectiveness and conversions of Instagram.

Instagram Shopping allows us to make personalized advertising of our products and increases web traffic to our e-commerce, in addition to our store will appear in the "Shop" tab, increasing our presence in the social network itself. More eyes seeing us are more possibilities of sales.

What do I need to start using Instagram Shopping

To start using Instagram Shopping as a sales medium we need to meet several requirements. The first is to have a business Instagram account, with at least nine posts in the feed, and linked to your Facebook page. 

The second is an e-commerce with a catalog of your products. It's imperative that your business has its own website domain and that website has an e-commerce where products can be purchased. What we will do with Instagram is to facilitate that purchase but without an e-commerce already created we will not be able to do anything. Think that Instagram is a showcase and you have to put the store yourself.

Once we have the e-commerce and the Instagram account linked, we need to set up a Business Manager account, a step that you have already taken if you have done Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, for example. 

How to create a store on Instagram Shopping

We have already taken the first steps and we meet the essential requirements that Meta asks for to start selling on Instagram, so let's create our store to start using it on the social network, something we will have to do from our Business Manager account. 

Currently, Meta only allows you to create "stores" in businesses that sell physical products, but we can create a catalog if we want to sell or advertise other types of items on Facebook and Instagram, such as travel for example.

The application itself will guide you step by step to create your store or your product catalog by choosing the method of purchase completion -on another website, on Facebook or Instagram (option only available in some countries) or by message- and the channel from which it will be sold. If our e-commerce is on platforms such as Shopify or PrestaShop, we can link the catalog without creating it again, because the data will be dumped automatically.

Once the store is created, it's time to add the products either manually (something practical if you have very few products), massively (with an excel document for example) or using a pixel, a tool that will allow us to make changes on the web and upload them to Instagram Shopping, something very useful if we have many products with a very variable stock. 

Each product, in addition to the price, can include information for the user, such as composition, a small description or recommended care. Once the products have been uploaded and if everything is correct in the preview, we will finish the task by sending the catalog for validation by Instagram. When we get the ok we can, from the Instagram application itself, activate Instagram Shopping and start selling from the social network

How to use Instagram Shopping

We have already created the store and we can begin to attract the attention of our customers with our publications. Remember the importance of images in Social Media and take care of the exposure of your products. To tag a product, upload a photo and click on "tag products", select the product card to which it corresponds. Instagram takes care of displaying the price of your catalog. And if there is more than one product in the image, no problem, you can tag up to five products per image and twenty per carousel.

In addition to the publications, in the store tab your entire catalog will appear in a showcase that you can customize by creating different collections, for example. We can even make ads that directly include the product to be sold so that even those who do not follow us can buy directly from the ad.

Perhaps it may seem a complicated task, but it is a way to show your products in a different way and to facilitate the whole buying process to buyers from a social network where we have many possibilities to sell. And if the process is a world away from you, our team will be happy to help you if you want to talk.

Main photo: Kevin Wong.